


Rhinestone Eyes

by orphan_account



Category: Motorcity
Genre: Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-28
Updated: 2012-07-28
Packaged: 2017-11-10 23:01:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/471668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>written for <a href="http://motorkink.dreamwidth.org/272.html?thread=424720#cmt424720">this</a> lovely prompt, which gave me so many delightfully angsty ideas. based on the song rhinestone eyes by gorillaz.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rhinestone Eyes

Some mornings Mike woke up and couldn’t quite remember where he was.

 

He was still drifting on his back through trenches and archipelagos, so incredibly still and silent that when consciousness kicked in it was almost frightening. The ocean would bend and swell around him, rising up with a single indignant shriek before dumping him off the edge of his bunk on the crest of a wave. He’d slam hard on the floor with a yelp and the white noise and the distant sound of things breaking would filter into his soggy half-dream and remind him.

 

Underground. Inland. Safe.

 

He would swear and roll onto his stomach, forehead against cold concrete for a few minutes, remembering when his mother had first told him as a little boy that if he dreamt of the ocean, the city lights wouldn’t seem so bright.

 

Night by night, the insomnia had dissipated as little Mike learned to float farther and farther away from the perpetual sterile slate of Deluxe. It wasn’t anything like Motorcity, which was loud and vivacious and never ceased shifting through shades of black, interspersed with fizzling circuits and splashes of spray paint, constantly building on itself like something _alive_. It was the last lost haven for starry-eyed dreamers, singing with the struggle for survival and a strange, desperate optimism.

 

The _utopia_ above was dead: bleached bones and slick silence, permeated with harsh incandescence and the tapping of uniform heels. It was suffocating. Even with the climate simulators, at its darkest, the metropolis _ate_ things with its brightness, washed out the stars completely. The city’s beacon, KaneCo tower, was ironically enough the darkest patch you could find when you looked out your pod window: the red, revolving glow just a shade dimmer than searchlights off white polymers. Once, Mike thought he’d even seen a pinpoint of light in the darkness between the neon scarlet panes.

 

Maybe that’s what drew him to Kane in the first place. He’d wanted to see stars. His mother had told him about how the ocean _danced_ at night when they shone down, accented by a big gold moon hanging like an apple when you held the stem between your fingers. To a young boy, and even now at times, when he closed his eyes, or held a bioengineered piece of fruit up to the light, it was impossible to visualize a night so perfect.

 

He’d giggled and bit into his snack. _Light from the sky? That’s silly, mommy. Light only comes from the walls._

_But this is different,_ she’d said, sounding a little bit tired, and a little bit sad.

 

She never quit talking in that weary, nostalgic tone about how the whole world had _glimmered_ underneath the carpet of the Milky Way (a glimmer that she’d seen only once, mind you, on a heavily monitored business trip). She worked in agriculture at KaneCo, up to her elbows in dirt and old nature documentaries every day, trying to figure out how to re-introduce life to the earth beyond Deluxe’s borders. Mike wondered sometimes when he looked out his window at night as a boy, torn between gentle waves and red lures dangling from the sky -the closest approximation of a moon he’d ever known- if she would succeed one day. Deluxe was the only safe place, he’d been taught. Everywhere else was dead, toxic wasteland. His teacher had shown him the pictures, and before he’d learned to dream of seashells and sturgeons, it had kept him up nights wondering at the emptiness of it all, at what could have _possibly_ been big enough, and harsh enough, to put an end to _everything_ , save one city.

 

To imagine something green coming from _that_ seemed even wilder a dream than the ones where he swam all the way to the seabed with a single breath. Squid, long extinct, were more real than the prospect of food grown from actual _trees_ instead of in massive cloning plants.

 

*

 

It doesn’t matter now, but when he’s only half-awake, Mike still broods on the scorched earth and fake apples and the salty waves he’s never seen, and wonders why he ever thought he could bring back the stars when he joined KaneCo’s cadet ranks. He’d signed up to be a killer. Signed up and stuck with the program, monthly parties at his squadron leader’s pod and all, and he’d been _stupid_ enough to believe if he perpetuated Kane’s dream long enough, something might _change_. Maybe with enough starched white and blue uniforms marching into the ruins, they could _force_ the world to glimmer once more, beat it into some semblance of shininess with big enough hammers. It’s the exact same thinking that launched the decimating missiles in the first place.

 

He tells himself he couldn’t help it. He was raised in an urban factory, spoon-fed cellophane lies and wired from birth to be loyal to the death to a murderer. He tells himself it’s not his fault, the jagged, disjointed creature he’s become, but that doesn’t help the guilt.

 

He knows he’s overcompensating for a life of strange loyalties and false gods with each day spent fighting and driving till he can feel the exertion in every muscle, burning to the marrow. He knows it’s not healthy, and it shows in the dark circles under his eyes, the haunted slump to his shoulders. The brave face he’s grafted over his own, the encouraging smiles and indomitable spirit are just as much corruptions of his nature as the cold-hearted thing he could’ve been, had he stayed. He can’t live with that.

 

One day it will break him, retaliating this hard, but every morning he wakes up paralyzed, still feeling like just another glass-eyed, happy Deluxe citizen is incentive enough to die; and if he’s going to die, damn fucking right he’ll die battling the eternal sunshine above. As if he has a choice. That soldier’s mentality is branded into ever fiber of Mike Chilton’s existence, just like every other bit of him that was manufactured in Deluxe, bred from birth for the betterment of humanity.


End file.
